Behind the Bastards - Part One: Henry Morton Stanley: The Explorer Who Shot His Way Through Africa
Aired: 2020-04-14
Duration: 01:20:31


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (02:53) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
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[00:01:12]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
[00:01:15]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:01:18]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:01:20]  That's so funny.
[00:01:21]  Shall we stay with me each night, each morning?
[00:01:29]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:37]  What's up, everyone?
[00:01:38]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:01:39]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:01:43]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:01:46]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:01:48]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:01:55]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:01:57]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:02:04]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:02:06]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:02:07]  There's a lot of life.
[00:02:09]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:18]  I don't have an introduction.
[00:02:20]  I'm Robert Evans.
[00:02:21]  This is Behind the Bastards.
[00:02:22]  It's a podcast about the worst people in history.
[00:02:24]  And we have, as our national ventilator stockpile runs out, my national introduction stockpile has been completely exhausted.
[00:02:32]  So these are desperate and dire times.
[00:02:35]  And I thank you all for tuning in.
[00:02:37]  My guest today to help me navigate these troubled waters is Mr. Sower and Bowie.
[00:02:43]  Air horn, air horn, air horn.
[00:02:46]  Yeah, we have to do the air horns manually because the air horn stockpiles out as well.
[00:02:51]  They're gone.
[00:02:52]  They're gone.

=== Behind The Bastards Intro (15:32) ===

[00:02:53]  We used them all up.
[00:02:54]  We used them all up.
[00:02:55]  The hospitals need them.
[00:02:59]  That's the new charity is air horns for hospitals.
[00:03:02]  Really?
[00:03:03]  Honestly, if you have an air horn or you have a voozila at home, maybe you went to the hospital.
[00:03:09]  Donate it today.
[00:03:10]  They need it more than you do.
[00:03:11]  Just drive past the hospital and throw it at them as hard as you can.
[00:03:16]  They will thank you.
[00:03:17]  Yeah.
[00:03:18]  Drive past the hospital and kick it out of your car like your ODing friend.
[00:03:23]  Soren, how are you doing today?
[00:03:26]  I'm pretty good.
[00:03:27]  Yeah, I feel good.
[00:03:28]  I mean, I want to make sure my levels are okay and everything.
[00:03:31]  I guess there's no way to even know that.
[00:03:34]  There is, but we'll just move right past that.
[00:03:36]  And our listeners will know if we got it right.
[00:03:38]  Soren, you are one of the writers on the TV show American Dad, which I love and have loved for years.
[00:03:47]  You are my former co-worker at cracked.internet.
[00:03:53]  And you also host a podcast now with my old boss and our mutual friend, Daniel O'Brien.
[00:03:59]  That's right.
[00:03:59]  Yeah, Daniel and I have a podcast called Quick Question with Soren and Dan.
[00:04:03]  I get front billing.
[00:04:04]  It's you do.
[00:04:05]  That makes sense.
[00:04:06]  You want to put the face up front, I think.
[00:04:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:10]  Now, Soren, you guys did an episode of your show recently where you talked about the old days at Cracked.
[00:04:16]  And you were talking particularly about some old sketches that we're glad we didn't get to make, or you're glad that you didn't get to make.
[00:04:24]  And during one of them, you brought up a guy that you had as a character in one of those sketches, Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:04:30]  Yeah, weird that we wouldn't have done a sketch about Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:04:34]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:36]  Especially because he was the hero in the sketch.
[00:04:40]  So you want to talk about who you know Henry Morton Stanley as?
[00:04:44]  Like what you know about this dude?
[00:04:46]  I hope you didn't.
[00:04:48]  No, I have a very cursory knowledge of Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:04:51]  Or as I like to call him, HMS.
[00:04:56]  That's why British ships are named that, by the way.
[00:04:59]  Don't look it up.
[00:05:01]  I know that he's a knight.
[00:05:03]  He's been knighted.
[00:05:04]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:05:05]  He was famous for going and finding he's the guy who says Dr. Livingston, I presume.
[00:05:10]  Yes, yes.
[00:05:10]  That's his most famous line.
[00:05:12]  Yeah.
[00:05:13]  Dr. Livingston.
[00:05:14]  And then Dr. Livingston at the time was like trying to find the source of the Nile.
[00:05:18]  He went to go try and find Livingston, found him.
[00:05:21]  And then Henry Morton Stanley spent a bunch of time trying to find the source of the Nile.
[00:05:26]  And then during all that time, he also got very involved with the slave trade, as far as I know, and let kind of everybody on his every one of his voyages die.
[00:05:35]  Yeah, everyone on all of his voyages dies.
[00:05:37]  He is the guy who actually finds the source of the Congo River.
[00:05:41]  Or at least I should say he is the white guy who finds the source of the Congo River and informs all the other white guys where it is.
[00:05:50]  And he is, he actually was very anti-slavery.
[00:05:53]  He was an abolitionist, but also in a way that morally doesn't really matter.
[00:05:58]  We'll be talking about that a lot this episode.
[00:06:00]  This is a fun one, Soren.
[00:06:02]  We are going to have us a motherfucking time.
[00:06:05]  I don't know if you can hear it, but I'm rubbing my hands together.
[00:06:07]  Like, ooh, delicious.
[00:06:08]  This hot dish in front of me.
[00:06:10]  I can't wait to eat it.
[00:06:11]  One of the reasons I'm excited to talk about this, Soren, is something else that came up in that episode you and Dan did of Quick Question, where you were talking about how, you know, when we all, when you had a column at Cracked, you or not just when you had a column, you were on a show that we did called After Hours, which was like a very popular show.
[00:06:26]  And you were one of the characters, and you guys discussed pop culture.
[00:06:29]  And your character was kind of like a caricature of, I think, how like you appear because you're a very handsome, all-American-looking fellow.
[00:06:38]  And so your character is like the archetype of the high school quarterback kind of guy, right?
[00:06:45]  And sort of like monotonously handsome.
[00:06:49]  Yeah.
[00:06:50]  And your concern with that, you know, looking back on it years later, is that it kind of contributed to some people's like unrealistic attitudes about masculinity.
[00:07:01]  And one of the fun things about this story is that Henry Morton Stanley did that in like the most dangerous way you possibly can.
[00:07:10]  And now there's like a, because of the lies he told, he wasn't like he wasn't, he didn't kill nearly as many people as he lied about killing.
[00:07:19]  And as a result, a bunch of other people committed a lot of murder.
[00:07:22]  And now there is a whole industry devoted to actually saying that Henry Morton Stanley was a good guy because he lied about how many people he killed.
[00:07:29]  It's a fun story.
[00:07:30]  We're really going to.
[00:07:31]  Yeah.
[00:07:33]  Yeah.
[00:07:34]  There will be a lot of fun opportunities for conversations about toxic masculinity in this.
[00:07:38]  But let's dig into this, this son of a bitch.
[00:07:42]  So I love people who lie in the wrong direction.
[00:07:44]  That's wonderful.
[00:07:45]  Yeah, it's really interesting.
[00:07:46]  This is such a wild tale.
[00:07:49]  So we talked about Henry Morton Stanley on my show a little bit earlier and we talked about King Leopold II of Belgium, who's the king who conquered Central Africa and killed 13 million people making a rubber factory.
[00:08:00]  Very ambitious.
[00:08:01]  Very ambitious.
[00:08:03]  Yeah.
[00:08:05]  Rode a tricycle a lot.
[00:08:06]  Weird dude.
[00:08:08]  And Stanley was like, we talk about Stanley a bit in that.
[00:08:10]  And one of my sources is King Leopold's Ghost, which is a really big, a really good book by Adam Hosschild.
[00:08:15]  And the Stanley that Adam describes was a monster who shot his way through the Congo to discover the source of the river, shot his way back out, and then connived a bunch of African chiefs to hand over their land by making them sign treaties they couldn't read and giving them cloth in return.
[00:08:29]  And like I said, that was kind of most people's interpretation of Stanley for most of the last hundred years, right?
[00:08:36]  Like he was popular during his lifetime, and pretty quickly afterwards, people were like, oh, this was a real, this guy was a bad dude.
[00:08:43]  But now there's a whole industry that sort of cropped up about rehabilitating not just him, but a lot of other British colonial figures.
[00:08:50]  And one of my sources for today's episode is a book written by one of those people.
[00:08:54]  In 2007, a guy named Tim Geal published Stanley, the Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer.
[00:09:01]  And Geal was able to get access to a never-before-open trove of Stanley's private letters and journal entries, which is how he learned about stuff like Stanley lying about how many people he'd killed.
[00:09:11]  And Geal is the guy who really starts trying to rehabilitate Stanley by saying that he was a much better guy than people think he is.
[00:09:19]  And it's, yeah, I'm going to quote a little bit from a 2011 Smithsonian magazine article that gives you an idea of how this is generally sold.
[00:09:26]  Quote, Another Stanley has recently emerged, neither a dauntless hero nor a ruthless control freak.
[00:09:31]  This explorer prevailed in the wilderness, not because his will was indomitable, but because he appreciated its limitations and used long-term strategies that social scientists are only now beginning to understand.
[00:09:41]  This new version of Stanley was found, appropriately enough, by Livingston's biographer Tim Geal, a British novelist and expert on Victorian obsessives.
[00:09:48]  Geal drew on thousands of Stanley's letters, yada, yada, yada, depicts a flawed character who seems all the more brave and humane for his ambition and insecurity, virtue and fraud.
[00:09:56]  So, and I should say, this article on Smithsonian is arguing that Stanley should be like a productivity guru that we take advice on.
[00:10:06]  It's fun.
[00:10:07]  Like, where this all has gone is real interesting.
[00:10:10]  Oh, that's like, I want those like Columbus apologists to do something like this.
[00:10:15]  Just like, hey, you know what?
[00:10:17]  Columbus maybe got a bad rap, everybody.
[00:10:19]  Maybe he got it and didn't get a fair shake.
[00:10:22]  Yeah, this is going to be full of a lot of that stuff.
[00:10:24]  So I read Geal's book, and I also went through King Leopold's Ghost again, and I did a bunch of other research, and we're going to have a fun time here, Soren.
[00:10:32]  We're just going to have us a good-ass time.
[00:10:34]  So, Sir Henry Morton Stanley was born on January 28th, 1841, under the name John Rowlands.
[00:10:42]  He was born a bastard in the literal sense of the word, so that's convenient for the show.
[00:10:46]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:48]  We don't really know who his dad was.
[00:10:50]  His mom was a woman named Betsy Perry, who was, by all accounts, a very promiscuous housemaid.
[00:10:57]  She got around.
[00:10:58]  Historically, that is widely discussed.
[00:11:04]  And it has an impact on Stanley later.
[00:11:07]  So his father was probably a guy named John Rowlands, who was a local town drunk who died from being the town drunk.
[00:11:13]  But we don't really know.
[00:11:14]  And other stories say his dad was a wealthy lawyer who eschewed all connection with his illegitimate child.
[00:11:19]  The important thing is that absolutely nobody wanted this kid around when he was born.
[00:11:24]  Like, wildly unwanted, to an extent that is just heartbreaking, actually.
[00:11:29]  Like, it's a bummer.
[00:11:32]  I don't know.
[00:11:33]  I've got a kid, and I'm around a lot of other kids, and sometimes you can just tell.
[00:11:36]  Yeah, some of them, some of them.
[00:11:38]  Yes, yes, yes, yes.
[00:11:40]  Some of them are like, nah, we don't, nobody wants that kid.
[00:11:43]  That is Soren Bowie's official stance.
[00:11:45]  It's okay if some kids are unwanted.
[00:11:47]  Yeah.
[00:11:49]  If a kid's not wanted, that's your internal clock and your internal compass telling you that's not a good kid.
[00:11:54]  That's a bad one.
[00:11:57]  That kid's going to be a problem.
[00:11:59]  Shouldn't have that kid.
[00:12:02]  So his mother abandoned him basically immediately and left him in the care of his uncles and his grandfather, Moses Perry.
[00:12:10]  And Adam Hosschild describes Moses Perry as, quote, a man who believed a boy needed a sound whipping if he misbehaved and kind of describes it as sort of an abusive relationship.
[00:12:21]  Jill takes the completely opposite task and argues that the two had a good relationship until Moses Perry fell down dead in the middle of a potato field on June 22nd, 1846, when John was five and a half years old.
[00:12:34]  So John was left fully in the care of his two uncles, who did not, in fact, care very much about him.
[00:12:39]  They subcontracted the gig and paid a poor family to take him in.
[00:12:42]  But eventually that family started asking for more money and the uncles refused.
[00:12:46]  And so they told John that his older cousin, Dick, was going to take him to another aunt in a town nearby.
[00:12:53]  And so John and Dick went on an eight-mile walk together.
[00:12:56]  And it was tragically, Soren, it was a walk of lies.
[00:12:59]  As John later wrote, quote, the way seemed interminable and tedious.
[00:13:03]  At last, Dick set me down from his shoulders before an immense stone building, and passing through tall iron gates, he pulled at a bell, which I could hear clanging noisily in the distant interior.
[00:13:12]  A somber-faced stranger appeared at the door who, despite my remonstrances, seized me by the hand and drew me within.
[00:13:18]  Now, as John was being pulled away, his cousin assured him that he would be right back.
[00:13:21]  He was going to get them both cakes, but this was also a lie.
[00:13:24]  In reality, Dick had abandoned the stone building cakes.
[00:13:27]  You know, as you do, you go out into the woods, you find the nearest stone building, and it's like, I bet they got cake in there.
[00:13:33]  So John just abandons his cousin to a workhouse.
[00:13:36]  That was the plan from the beginning.
[00:13:39]  Yeah, Jill writes, quote, the false cajolings and treacherous endearments lavished upon him during that journey would live forever in Henry Stanley's memory.
[00:13:47]  Since that dreadful evening, Stanley would write in his 50s, My resentment has not a whit abated.
[00:13:51]  It would have been far better for me if Dick, being stronger than I, had employed compulsion instead of shattering my confidence and planting the first seeds of distrust in a child's heart.
[00:14:01]  So this is a bad thing that happens.
[00:14:03]  And I'm going to guess, you've heard of workhouses, right, Soren?
[00:14:06]  Yeah, I'm familiar.
[00:14:07]  Yeah, most people probably have, if only from the Christmas Carol.
[00:14:11]  You know, there's a bit where Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to donate money to the poor and he asks, are there no prisons?
[00:14:16]  Are there no workhouses?
[00:14:18]  And this is the kind of place that John Rowlands at age six gets put into, the St. Asaf Union Workhouse.
[00:14:24]  So the British government, which was at the time conquering big chunks of the world and stealing their shit, did not like the idea of taking care of their own poor people.
[00:14:34]  And in fact, the powers that be found it disgusting, the idea that they would provide good care for the poor.
[00:14:40]  So they had workhouses and these provided basic necessities, but they did so while treating the inmates as if they are prisoners because they were considered to be basically criminal for needing assistance.
[00:14:52]  So it's a child prison for poor kids.
[00:14:55]  Oh, that's wonderful.
[00:14:56]  It's awesome.
[00:15:01]  It's kind of hard to exaggerate how bad England sucks in this period of time.
[00:15:08]  It's just so bleak.
[00:15:10]  It's so bleak.
[00:15:11]  It's like this factory, benighted, coal-drenched hellscape of dying kids and fancy people.
[00:15:22]  It's the best.
[00:15:22]  But like the kids are the working class.
[00:15:24]  Like that's your ones who are doing all of the jobs.
[00:15:27]  For some reason, they only made jobs available to children.
[00:15:30]  Well, their little hands can reach all sorts of things, Soren.
[00:15:33]  Yeah, they make very good chimney sweeps.
[00:15:34]  I'll say that.
[00:15:35]  Yeah, incredible chimney sweeps.
[00:15:37]  So inmates at the workhouse, and again, a lot of them are children, are required to wake up at 6 a.m. and they're locked in their dorms at 8 p.m.
[00:15:45]  They received only bread and gruel for food.
[00:15:47]  Husbands and wives were separated, as were parents and children.
[00:15:51]  If you were poor enough to need state assistance, the state decided that you no longer deserve to have a family.
[00:15:56]  Even siblings were kept apart.
[00:15:57]  Poor children were seen as wholly to blame for their circumstances.
[00:16:01]  As an adult, Stanley would write, it is a fearful fate, that of a British outcast, because the punishment afflicts the mind and breaks the heart.
[00:16:09]  Which is certainly truthful.
[00:16:11]  It is, you read about this guy's background, and it's like, not that this makes his crimes okay, but like, hard to imagine this ending well.
[00:16:20]  Yeah, it does feel like a lot of these end up.
[00:16:22]  I've listened to a few of your podcasts, I'll say, and it seems like a lot of them, you kind of have to get on a dark bus for the beginning of it because you have to see where all this originated.
[00:16:30]  And every single time, like, somebody teaches these people how to hate really well, like how to be really good at hating.
[00:16:36]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:16:37]  Saddam Hussein, giant monsters, like, oh, yeah, and he was threatening his teachers with a gun when he was like 14.
[00:16:42]  Yeah, that kind of scans.
[00:16:44]  Yeah, I see where this evolution happens.
[00:16:46]  Stalin was getting beat so bad that he was peeing blood, and you're like, okay, I get it.
[00:16:50]  I get what I do.
[00:16:51]  I get it.
[00:16:53]  Yeah.
[00:16:54]  Yeah, okay.
[00:16:55]  It's not so hard to draw these lines together.
[00:16:59]  So it's, and it's interesting.
[00:17:02]  Like, that line that I just read above is certainly truthful.
[00:17:05]  We have a lot of other accounts from workhouses and they sucked.
[00:17:08]  But it's hard to trust Stanley on anything because he lied about everything, including his time at St. Asaph's.
[00:17:15]  He would go on to claim later in his writings that he saw a boy beaten to death by James Francis, the school teacher.
[00:17:22]  And the general consensus of historians based on workhouse records and other people who were in that workhouse at the time is that nothing like this happened while Stanley was at the school.
[00:17:32]  And in fact, most people who recalled their time there seemed to think pretty fondly of this teacher.
[00:17:37]  And so, yeah, it's it's it's it's interesting.
[00:17:42]  And Stanley would later tell lies about like getting into a fight with this teacher himself and like beating him up and like being cheered on by the rest of the school.
[00:17:50]  And these are almost certainly lies, but they were also probably a cover for something very sad, which is childhood sexual abuse.
[00:17:57]  The year that Stanley was admitted to St. Asaph's, yeah, we don't really know, but like the year he was admitted, 19 of the girls at the poorhouse were turned out as prostitutes and pimped by some of the male employees.
[00:18:09]  And a government inspector who observed the school during this time noted that young male inmates regularly slept with each other and experimented sexually.
[00:18:17]  And a lot of that experimentation was probably not consensual on both sides.
[00:18:22]  I love that the government has an inspector to go check out the workhouses.

=== Stanley's Childhood Lies (11:39) ===

[00:18:26]  Yeah.
[00:18:26]  Like, what is he hoping to find there?
[00:18:30]  Yeah, you are kind of at a loss to like, what would have been possibly the, like, you're not doing anything to stop this from happening.
[00:18:38]  So what's your hope here?
[00:18:40]  Yeah.
[00:18:40]  Yeah.
[00:18:40]  You created a prison for children.
[00:18:42]  Yeah.
[00:18:43]  When you go there, you're like, oh, no, they're having sex with each other.
[00:18:47]  You got to be kidding me.
[00:18:48]  I have to raise the alarm.
[00:18:49]  It turns out things are rather bleak at the child prison.
[00:18:55]  So we don't know if Stanley engaged in any of this experimentation or if he was sexually abused.
[00:19:01]  He would always claim in letters to like his romantic partners that he stayed pure at the school while writing about it later, but that doesn't fucking mean a damn thing.
[00:19:09]  Whatever, yeah, whatever the truth, Stanley was noted the rest of his life by everyone who knew him for having an extreme terror of physical and sexual intimacy.
[00:19:20]  And this terror remained with him for the entirety of his life.
[00:19:23]  So something happened.
[00:19:25]  We don't really know what, but this boy walks out of it real changed.
[00:19:31]  Yeah, I think he went in a little changed too.
[00:19:33]  You don't walk through the woods with your surrogate father who's lavishing you with praise and then drops you off at a workhouse and be like, yeah, you know what?
[00:19:39]  I'm going to let somebody else in.
[00:19:40]  It feels like the opportunity for me to open my heart to someone else.
[00:19:43]  This is one of those stories that it reads like an experiment for like, how much can we damage a child?
[00:19:50]  Like, if we really go all in, how badly can we fuck a kid up?
[00:19:54]  Yeah.
[00:19:55]  So Stanley did at the least receive an education, which, you know, generally was considered to be pretty decent where he went.
[00:20:02]  He learned how to read and write, and he excelled at school while he was in the workhouse.
[00:20:05]  He was awarded a fancy Bible from the local bishop for his scholastic excellence.
[00:20:10]  Young John Rowlands, and again, that's his name at the time.
[00:20:13]  That's his real name is John Rowlands, was particularly enamored by geography and pinmanship.
[00:20:18]  Throughout his life, he made a point of writing neatly, almost to an obsessive degree.
[00:20:23]  In King Leopold's Ghost, Hosschild writes, It was as if through his handwriting he were trying to pull himself out of disgrace and turn the script of his life from one of poverty to one of elegance.
[00:20:33]  Which I think is probably a pretty accurate description.
[00:20:36]  So John may not have had the very worst childhood a boy could have in Wales, but it was pretty close to that.
[00:20:41]  The defining moment of his early life came when he was 12.
[00:20:44]  His supervisor, quote, came up to me during the dinner hour when all the inmates were assembled and pointed out a tall woman with an oval face and a great coil of dark hair behind her head.
[00:20:53]  He asked me if I recognized her.
[00:20:55]  No, sir, I replied.
[00:20:56]  What?
[00:20:56]  Do you not know your own mother?
[00:20:58]  I started with a burning face and directed a shy glance at her and perceived she was regarding me with a look of cruel, critical scrutiny.
[00:21:05]  I had expected to feel a gush of tenderness towards her, but her expression was so chilling that the valves of my heart closed with a snap.
[00:21:12]  So that's a bad thing to go through as a kid.
[00:21:16]  Oh man, yeah, that's a rough one.
[00:21:22]  He saw his mom at the...
[00:21:24]  So was she then in the workhouse as well?
[00:21:26]  She had two more kids, and she wasn't going to take care of them, but they were also young enough that she couldn't just drop them out.
[00:21:32]  The workhouse basically, I think, made her kind of hang around to finish breastfeeding them and stuff before she could abandon them.
[00:21:38]  So she's there for a while with her other kids before she abandons them too.
[00:21:43]  And yeah, not great.
[00:21:48]  At least you know that the records, the record keeping there is good.
[00:21:52]  Yeah, it's really good record keeping.
[00:21:53]  Absolutely.
[00:21:55]  They know, not only do they, they know that this was his mother, they're not just like taking in kids and being like, yeah, well, the parents didn't want you.
[00:22:01]  We don't know who they are.
[00:22:02]  They're like, no, we're going to keep track so that when you are old enough for the age of revenge, we'll give you a name on a piece of paper and you can go take care of it.
[00:22:09]  It would be so much less depressing if he got revenge on her, but the rest of his life, part of why he lied so much is he was like very dedicated to making his mom proud, and she clearly didn't give a fuck about him and at best wanted his money.
[00:22:23]  It's a fucking bummer, dude.
[00:22:26]  Jesus.
[00:22:27]  So the workhouse remained John Rowlands' life until the age of 15 when he escaped.
[00:22:33]  Now, the reality of the situation seems to be that escape wasn't really hard, and he basically just fucked off because he was old enough to do so.
[00:22:39]  But Stanley felt the need to dream up a lurid lie about how he left the school.
[00:22:43]  And I'm going to quote from Adam Hosschild again.
[00:22:46]  He tells of leaving the Welsh workhouse in melodramatic terms.
[00:22:49]  He leapt over a garden wall and escaped, he claims, after leading a class rebellion against a cruel supervisor named James Francis, who had viciously brutalized the entire senior class.
[00:22:58]  Never again, I shouted, marveling at my own audacity, Stanley wrote.
[00:23:02]  The words had scarcely escaped me ere I found myself swung upwards into the air by the collar of my jacket and flung into a nerveless heap on the bench.
[00:23:10]  The passionate brute pummeled me in the stomach until I fell backward, gasping for breath.
[00:23:14]  Again, I was lifted, dashed upon the bench with a shock that almost broke my spine.
[00:23:20]  And this is, again, all lies.
[00:23:22]  One of the things that Hosschild notes, and that Jill notes, is that Stanley was at that point a very healthy 15-year-old boy, while his teacher was a sick, middle-aged former cold miner who was missing a hand.
[00:23:37]  He was unlikely to have been doing a lot of throwing.
[00:23:42]  Incredible.
[00:23:43]  Yeah, so most people seem to agree if there had actually been a fight, the 15-year-old healthy boy probably would have beaten the handless coal miner, but you know.
[00:23:54]  Yeah, the man with black lung and COPD.
[00:23:57]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:59]  He wasn't a prize fighter.
[00:24:02]  And none of Stanley's classmates recalled anything like this happening.
[00:24:05]  And yeah, again, they considered Francis to have been a nice guy and Stanley to have been the teacher's pet.
[00:24:11]  And again, one of the really sad things about this is that one of the suspicions is that why he later developed such a grudge against John Francis is that maybe Francis, who there's a good chance was gay, maybe Francis made a pass at him once he's, you know, because like 15 people were considered, yeah, so maybe the teacher made a pass at him or something more.
[00:24:31]  And that's why Stanley felt the need to attack him so much, but we really don't know.
[00:24:36]  But something happened there too.
[00:24:38]  Like there's a couple points like this in his life where it's like, yeah, something happened to make you tell that specific kind of lie.
[00:24:45]  It's crazy.
[00:24:46]  And also, what you're probably getting from this is that young Stanley was a big fan of a sea dick, Charles Dickens.
[00:24:54]  And Dickens, like, that's a very Dickinsian moment.
[00:24:57]  Like, the child fights off the abusive teacher to save his classmates and then winds up on a magical journey.
[00:25:07]  Like, that's a fucking Charles Dickens story.
[00:25:09]  You know, Stanley would be throughout his life a big Dickens fan.
[00:25:12]  It probably influenced how he wrote his own biography.
[00:25:16]  Yeah.
[00:25:17]  Actually, okay, so a lot of things are falling into place.
[00:25:19]  Yes, that's right.
[00:25:20]  His writing style is so purple.
[00:25:22]  And like, I could see, yeah.
[00:25:24]  Yeah, he's very influenced by Dickens.
[00:25:28]  And as a really fun note, if anybody wants to know more about Charles Dickens from like an interesting perspective, George Orwell wrote so many fucking articles about Charles Dickens' writing and like analyzed him from like the perspective of a socialist.
[00:25:40]  He's a really interesting setup.
[00:25:42]  There's a bunch of them in the collection, All Art is Propaganda, which is a good chunk of Orwell reading if you're into that.
[00:25:49]  Anyway, so yeah, after he escapes from the workhouse or just kind of walks out the door because they don't really care all that much, Stanley winds up, you know, living with a series of relatives for brief periods of time, but none of them wanted to put him up for long.
[00:26:03]  And he eventually wound up living with an uncle in Liverpool, working as the delivery boy to a butcher.
[00:26:08]  And John got the feeling that he was going to be kicked out onto the street at any moment, and he was probably right about that.
[00:26:14]  And fortunately, at right around the same time, he wound up delivering meat to an American merchant ship called the Windermere, which was docked nearby.
[00:26:22]  And as Stanley kind of describes it, and this is probably broadly accurate because this wasn't uncommon at the time, the captain basically looked him up and down and was like, hey, you want to work on a boat?
[00:26:34]  There weren't a lot of rules back in the day about this sort of thing.
[00:26:38]  It feels like there were like 12 people in history.
[00:26:40]  Yeah.
[00:26:40]  Like every time somebody wanted a job, they're like, oh, all right, I'll get you a job.
[00:26:44]  Yeah, sure.
[00:26:46]  Yeah, so he does the pretty normal thing for a poor kid in this part of the world at the time.
[00:26:51]  And he gets a gig fucking working on a boat that takes him to the United States.
[00:26:56]  And John very clearly was not a fan of sea life.
[00:26:59]  And as soon as the Windermere landed in New Orleans in February of 1859, he jumped ship and basically just wandered into America and said, okay, I guess I'm going to have a life here.
[00:27:10]  Because again, you could do that at the time.
[00:27:13]  In some ways, I'm like, I'm really, it's depressing to hear about history.
[00:27:17]  In other ways, I'm like, fuck, everything was so much easier.
[00:27:20]  A lot of stuff was easier.
[00:27:22]  You could just be like, you know what?
[00:27:23]  I want to be in a, I feel like I want to be in Louisiana.
[00:27:26]  I will figure out a way to get there.
[00:27:28]  And if I don't die of cholera, no one's going to stop me.
[00:27:31]  Right.
[00:27:31]  Yeah.
[00:27:31]  The thing you really had to worry about were diseases and abusive people.
[00:27:34]  But like, the opportunities beyond those horrific things were endless.
[00:27:39]  Yeah.
[00:27:39]  It wasn't hard to just do shit like that.
[00:27:43]  You know, if it, yeah, nobody was making you fill out a whole lot of paperwork.
[00:27:48]  Yes, yeah, you're not being tracked for your like his credit wasn't a consideration at that point.
[00:27:54]  Yeah, no, it was not.
[00:27:55]  Um, and and again, this is another one of one of what will become many different parts of the Stanley story where his version of events and reality diverge.
[00:28:02]  But he claims that basically he's wandering around the streets of New Orleans and he sees a local business owner, uh, like looks up at this guy who's wearing a nice suit and runs a business.
[00:28:12]  Uh, and he walks up, he just walks up to this guy and says, Do you want a boy, sir?
[00:28:17]  Oh my god, that's your resume in the 1850s.
[00:28:24]  Wow, just a just a single word, I boy, next to a dash.
[00:28:31]  Wow, God, what a gig to have.
[00:28:35]  But this distinguished gentleman did, in fact, want a boy.
[00:28:38]  He turned out to be a wealthy cot.
[00:28:45]  Yes, I do need a boy.
[00:28:47]  You know what?
[00:28:48]  I came into town for one of those.
[00:28:50]  I was gonna pick me up a boy at the workhouse, but this is this is fasta.
[00:28:54]  So, uh, yeah, this gentleman turned out to be the wealthy cotton salesman Henry Hope Stanley, um, who was a real person and was a very successful merchant in New Orleans at the time.
[00:29:07]  And again, according to Stanley's version of events, which is a lie, Henry Hope Stanley instantly developed a liking for our boy John and became his mentor and surrogate father figure.
[00:29:17]  Uh, he got him a job working for a shopkeeper named James Speak.
[00:29:21]  Um, and again, the only part of this is that's true is that Stanley worked for James Speak.
[00:29:25]  And the reality is we don't even know that he even met Henry Morton Stanley.
[00:29:28]  And in fact, he probably did not.
[00:29:31]  Stanley inserts Henry Hope Stanley into the story decades later.
[00:29:35]  The likely reality is that he was, in fact, wandering the streets, walked into this guy's shop and said, Do you want a boy?
[00:29:41]  And this guy was like, Yeah, sure.
[00:29:42]  And he worked at this guy's shop until he died and then he went on with his life.
[00:29:46]  But that's Stanley has to lie.
[00:29:49]  He judges up the story and he adds in this rich person who has the name that he later adopts.
[00:29:54]  That's incredible.
[00:29:55]  He's got such like a Trumpian element to him.
[00:29:58]  Yeah.
[00:29:59]  Totally.
[00:29:59]  He can't help himself but lie to let to sound in any way, any like little tiny way grander.

=== Henry Morton Stanley Myth (04:32) ===

[00:30:06]  Yeah.
[00:30:06]  Yeah.
[00:30:07]  They're all kind of everyone we talk about on this show is kind of the same person, with the exception of L. Ron Hubbard, who is at the top of the heap.
[00:30:19]  Robert.
[00:30:20]  But I mean, Robert, before you get into it, do you know what time it is?
[00:30:25]  I can't imagine what you're trying to lead me towards, Sophie.
[00:30:28]  I don't know.
[00:30:29]  Just this thing that, you know, keeps this podcast afloat.
[00:30:32]  Oh, oh, oh, you mean robbing merchant vessels on the Spanish main?
[00:30:37]  Exactly.
[00:30:38]  Yeah.
[00:30:39]  For some information.
[00:30:41]  Oh, absolutely, Soren.
[00:30:43]  Yeah, did your gun not come in the mail?
[00:30:46]  No, but I mean, I got a lot.
[00:30:47]  This is fun.
[00:30:48]  Yeah, this will be a real hoot.
[00:30:51]  Yeah.
[00:30:51]  All right.
[00:30:51]  Well, we're going to go find a merchantman on the Spanish main.
[00:30:54]  You do the same, and we will all meet back to talk more about Henry Morton Stanley and divide up the booty.
[00:31:05]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:31:09]  Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
[00:31:12]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:31:15]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:31:19]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:31:22]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:31:28]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:31:33]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:31:35]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:31:37]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:31:39]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:31:42]  I said, oh hell no.
[00:31:43]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:31:46]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:31:50]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:31:52]  Trust me, babe.
[00:31:53]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:32:03]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:32:08]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:32:13]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:32:19]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:32:28]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:32:33]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:32:37]  He related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:32:39]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:32:41]  That's so funny.
[00:32:43]  Sherry, stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:32:51]  Say you love me.
[00:32:54]  You know I.
[00:32:56]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:33:03]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:33:09]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:33:16]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:33:22]  From power to parenthood.
[00:33:24]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:33:28]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:33:30]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:33:32]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:33:37]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:33:43]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:33:46]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:33:52]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:33:54]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:33:57]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:34:05]  What's up, everyone?
[00:34:06]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:34:07]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:34:16]  Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:34:21]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:34:26]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:34:29]  I'm working my way up through it.
[00:34:30]  I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:34:33]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== A Cussedly Tough Survivor (14:21) ===

[00:34:38]  Yeah.
[00:34:38]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:34:41]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:34:43]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:34:51]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:34:54]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
[00:35:00]  Just hang in there.
[00:35:01]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:35:03]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:35:04]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:35:05]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:35:15]  We're back.
[00:35:16]  Oh my gosh.
[00:35:17]  That was some good pillaging, some good looting.
[00:35:20]  I have a lot of doubloons now.
[00:35:22]  You do, you do.
[00:35:23]  You're going to want to find a boy to help you with that.
[00:35:26]  I need a fence for these.
[00:35:27]  I don't even know.
[00:35:28]  I want to work.
[00:35:29]  Does like Target take these?
[00:35:31]  Actually, yeah, Target does.
[00:35:33]  Costco does not.
[00:35:34]  They prefer pieces of eight, which are probably the same things, but whatever.
[00:35:39]  Fuck you.
[00:35:40]  So Stanley starts working for this guy, James Speak, and he basically works as a boy in a shop.
[00:35:44]  And he's really good at working in like a, this is like essentially like a grocery store type deal or a general store.
[00:35:50]  And he's good at the job.
[00:35:51]  He has an incredible memory.
[00:35:52]  Everybody seems to agree that about him.
[00:35:54]  And so he's really good at keeping things stocked and knowing, you know, what needs to move.
[00:35:58]  And yeah, he's a good worker.
[00:36:00]  But Stanley's version of the story is very different.
[00:36:03]  He claims that while he's working for James Speak, he and Henry Hope Stanley are growing very close and that they basically spend two years traveling up and down the Mississippi on business.
[00:36:13]  And that the old man eventually tells Stanley, who becomes a surrogate son, that he's giving him the right to use the Stanley name.
[00:36:22]  Yeah.
[00:36:22]  So fucking Stanley will claim that Henry Hope Stanley died in 1861, which is a lie.
[00:36:28]  He lived for like another 16 years.
[00:36:31]  What a weird thing to lie about.
[00:36:32]  Yeah, he lies about everything, though.
[00:36:36]  So, yeah, there's no evidence that he and Stanley arranged, exchanged so much as a word, but you need to understand like the real story and the fake story.
[00:36:42]  The fake story is that, you know, he works with this guy, James Speak, who pays him very well, and then James Speak dies when a plague hits town, and Stanley winds up needing to move on.
[00:36:52]  Yeah, so it's cool.
[00:36:56]  Yeah, it's the opposite of cool.
[00:37:00]  Stanley is not a cool dude.
[00:37:02]  He's not a cool dude.
[00:37:03]  Throughout the early 1860s, though, he starts adopting the name of like one of the richest people in town and gradually gradually changing.
[00:37:10]  Yeah, that is not a bad call.
[00:37:12]  What a great rebrand.
[00:37:13]  Yeah.
[00:37:14]  Yeah, John Rowlands is a shitty name anyway.
[00:37:17]  Like, Henry Morton Stanley, you just tell that name to someone and asks, this is a famous person.
[00:37:22]  What do you think they did?
[00:37:23]  One of your first three guesses is going to be Explorer, right?
[00:37:27]  Like, yeah, absolutely.
[00:37:29]  Yeah.
[00:37:31]  So, yeah, I'm going to read a quote from King Leopold's Ghost explaining the process of him stealing this other man's name.
[00:37:38]  In the 1860 New Orleans census, he is listed as Jay Rowling.
[00:37:41]  A woman who knew him at the time remembered him as John Rowlands, smart as a whip and much given to bragging, big talk and telling stories, she said.
[00:37:50]  Yeah.
[00:37:50]  Within a few years, however, he began using the first and last name of the merchant who had given him his job.
[00:37:55]  He continued to experiment with the middle names, using Morley, Morlake, and Morland before finally settling on Morton.
[00:38:01]  So yeah, that's more or less the truth.
[00:38:03]  And Tim Geel's revisionist history of Stanley, the one that's like really pro-Stanley, goes into the fact that he's lying about all of this.
[00:38:10]  Like, Giol, in a lot of ways, it's a very valuable book because, again, he was like the first guy with access to this dude's notes.
[00:38:15]  There's a lot of it that's in there that's interesting.
[00:38:17]  The stuff that's shitty, I think, is actually Geol's personal conclusions about everything.
[00:38:22]  But he's very open about the fact that Henry Morton Stanley lied about fucking everything.
[00:38:29]  But he has all these really fun explanations and justifications for why Stanley lied in every case.
[00:38:35]  Like, he's defensive of his biography subject, and he feels the need to explain why it's cool that he did all this.
[00:38:43]  And his argument in favor of stealing a man's name is that Henry first told this lie to his mother after he was famous and that it became a part of his biography later.
[00:38:52]  And so he started lying about this because he wanted her to believe that somebody rich and powerful had adopted him, which is actually kind of plausible that like he wanted because he'd been abandoned by every single adult in his childhood, he wanted to be able to go back to them and be like, this guy was rich and cool and he thought I was good enough to be his son.
[00:39:12]  He wanted me.
[00:39:14]  Yeah, which is a bummer and kind of scans.
[00:39:17]  Like I'll give Geel that one.
[00:39:19]  Later on, his justifications get worse.
[00:39:21]  That one, yeah, I could see that being the truth.
[00:39:25]  So, and Geo goes on to note, and this is where we get into him being really defensive, and I find it fun.
[00:39:31]  Yet his lies have led his critics to treat him with disdain and condescension ever since.
[00:39:35]  His private lies to his mother were made public by her without his knowledge, thus making it all but impossible for him to be honest later.
[00:39:41]  Young people who lie usually do so because they feel bad about themselves and need to enhance their self-esteem.
[00:39:46]  That Stanley should have been trapped for the whole of his life by what he had said to his mother during his 20s was a personal tragedy for him and for his subsequent reputation.
[00:39:54]  And one of the things that's interesting about Jiel is he is as frustrated at people judging Stanley for this as he is at them judging Stanley for gunning people down in the Congo.
[00:40:03]  Like, it's just both have equal weight in his blood.
[00:40:08]  Yeah, they absolutely do.
[00:40:11]  And it's fun.
[00:40:12]  I think that without meeting Jill, I'm pretty confident that he's a liar.
[00:40:17]  He's somebody who has lied in his past.
[00:40:18]  He's like, well, kids lie because they're all bull.
[00:40:22]  Yes, yes, they do, but that's not why we're critical of Stanley.
[00:40:27]  Now, yeah, so anyway, for a while, Henry worked at a general store in a log cabin selling all sorts of tools that people needed as they kind of moved into the less settled parts of Louisiana.
[00:40:39]  He became particularly interested in different sorts of rifles and revolvers and became very knowledgeable about firearms.
[00:40:45]  And this was as much out of necessity as interest.
[00:40:47]  Southern culture at the time was brutal in ways we don't normally talk about because there was slavery, and that's kind of everyone's focus on how brutal that was.
[00:40:56]  But the brutality extended throughout every layer of Southern culture.
[00:41:00]  And it included the fact that plantation owners and their like were extremely physically aggressive people as a matter of rule.
[00:41:07]  Something about owning hundreds of human beings that seems like it makes you unwilling to listen to what anyone else has to say.
[00:41:13]  And Jill has actually a pretty good quote here.
[00:41:16]  It shocked Henry after the civilities of the city to witness gunfights and to hear about murders and disappearances.
[00:41:21]  With so many vain and violent men around him, possessing natures as sensitive as hair triggers, he was careful not to argue with any backwoodsman or planter who might draw a gun on the least provocation.
[00:41:31]  However amiable they might originally have been, their isolation had promoted the growth of egotism.
[00:41:36]  These southern gentlemen talked endlessly about their honor and often acted to avenge it.
[00:41:40]  In this environment, it was every man for himself.
[00:41:42]  So in case of trouble, Henry bought a Smith Wesson revolver and practiced with it until he could sever a pack thread at 20 paces.
[00:41:49]  So I feel like that's still scanned.
[00:41:52]  That's like a lesson you can still live by today.
[00:41:54]  Yeah.
[00:41:54]  Yeah, if you're going to live in the South, learn how to sever a thread with a revolver and keep it on you at all times.
[00:41:59]  I've always said that.
[00:42:00]  Yeah.
[00:42:01]  And if you're in a rural area, don't fuck with anybody there.
[00:42:05]  Absolutely not.
[00:42:08]  Yeah, yeah, don't argue with people out in the sticks.
[00:42:12]  You know, just move along.
[00:42:15]  Just get going.
[00:42:18]  Keep on trucking.
[00:42:21]  So people who knew Stanley during this period described him as talkative and intelligent, short but burly and confident, unless he was asked about his family.
[00:42:29]  Questions about his family caused him to stutter and eventually mumble out, there is a mystery about my birth.
[00:42:37]  Wait, he's not even a good liar.
[00:42:39]  No, no, no, no.
[00:42:41]  I didn't even think about that in person when he was actually doing his lying.
[00:42:44]  He was not bad at it.
[00:42:45]  No, he doesn't seem to have been great at it.
[00:42:47]  He was a good, he was a good writing liar.
[00:42:51]  So after a year or so in Louisiana, Stanley's boss died and Stanley was forced to move to Cypress Bend at the age of 19.
[00:42:59]  He got a job at another store and rented a room at a cheap boarding house.
[00:43:02]  And Stanley stood out there.
[00:43:04]  His colorful neckerchiefs and his habitual cleanliness were at odds with the sort of people who crashed at what was essentially a mix between a shitty motel and a for-profit homeless shelter.
[00:43:13]  Like, that's kind of what a boarding house is in this part of the world at the time.
[00:43:17]  A lot of real rough customers moving through.
[00:43:19]  And then you have kind of this fancy lad.
[00:43:21]  Yeah, this Victorian fop who rolls through.
[00:43:24]  Yeah, big fan of CD.
[00:43:27]  Colorful kerchiefs.
[00:43:28]  Colorful kerchiefs.
[00:43:29]  Really wants to be a British noble, even though he comes from, I mean, the poorest fucking working class background, you can.
[00:43:36]  Right.
[00:43:36]  This is an example of relying in the wrong direction.
[00:43:38]  Like, trying to establish himself as an aristocrat in a place where no one wants that.
[00:43:43]  Yeah.
[00:43:43]  It's like, no, your background would help you here, Stanley.
[00:43:46]  Tell people the truth.
[00:43:48]  Yeah, and it is one of those things where throughout his life, like a lot of fancy British people will always treat him like shit, even after he becomes rich and famous because he comes from a lower class background.
[00:43:57]  Well, like the Americans he works with, they're just like, yeah, whatever.
[00:44:03]  You can shoot a pack threat at 30 paces.
[00:44:05]  That's all I care about because we are going to shoot at each other.
[00:44:09]  I come from the South.
[00:44:11]  I can't not shoot somebody.
[00:44:13]  I got it.
[00:44:13]  I haven't shot a single person all day.
[00:44:15]  You're not my buddy if we haven't gotten into an afternoon gunfight.
[00:44:19]  Yeah.
[00:44:20]  So Henry got malaria shortly after moving and dropped down to just 95 pounds.
[00:44:25]  And this happens.
[00:44:26]  Yeah, this happens so many times throughout his life.
[00:44:28]  He will drop down to like the weight of a 10-year-old repeatedly just because, you know, he's always sick and dying.
[00:44:37]  He was in the Congo for a huge chunk of his life.
[00:44:40]  Yeah.
[00:44:40]  He spends about like half of his life actively dying of some sort of horrible contagious disease.
[00:44:48]  And that's the case with every explorer.
[00:44:51]  Like I do a lot of reading about the lives of great explorers because that's my shit.
[00:44:56]  And they all are always dying of the illnesses they've picked up.
[00:44:59]  Like the best of them were just constantly ill and just didn't quite die.
[00:45:04]  I love that.
[00:45:05]  In actuality, these people are being dragged through their exploration.
[00:45:10]  They're not actually out there cutting stuff, bushwhacking with their own machete or anything.
[00:45:14]  They're being carried on a paliquin as they slowly wither away into nothing.
[00:45:18]  Some of them are.
[00:45:19]  Stanley is one of those guys who is famous for like always working his ass off.
[00:45:24]  And a number of them were like what they would just always be sick and dying.
[00:45:28]  And the ones that got famous are the ones who didn't die.
[00:45:32]  Like the whole team would croak basically and it would just be like Stanley and a bunch of like local people wandering into some town.
[00:45:42]  Yeah, it's funny to me that like the stereotypical image of like one of these guys is kind of like the rock in those Jumanji movies or whatever, like where like big barrel chested wearing that shirt they all wore.
[00:45:54]  And like the reality is like they looked like fucking concentration camp survivors a lot of the time because they just had been dying for nine months.
[00:46:01]  Like they had no calories left.
[00:46:02]  They were shitting themselves uncontrollably, like just couldn't keep food down, zero fat on their bones.
[00:46:10]  And that's Stanley's whole life.
[00:46:11]  He's actively looks like a dead man most of his days.
[00:46:15]  He's Christian Balen the machinist.
[00:46:17]  Yes.
[00:46:17]  His whole life.
[00:46:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:20]  It's rough.
[00:46:21]  And that's just a cause.
[00:46:22]  Like everyone's sick all the time back in those days.
[00:46:24]  So he moves to the sticks and immediately almost dies.
[00:46:28]  And despite being on the verge of death, his new boss, who's like working at a shop, sends him out regularly to work as a debt collector and collect debts from customers, which is not a safe vocation.
[00:46:38]  So he's like in armed standoffs with men as he's shitting himself uncontrollably and like barely able to stay conscious.
[00:46:45]  So Stanley lives though, because he's one thing you can say for Stanley, he was a cussedly tough son of a bitch.
[00:46:53]  Yeah, and he doesn't die, as will be the long story with this guy.
[00:46:58]  And during this time, as he's working as a debt collector and dying, he had exactly two encounters with members of the opposite sex, and both of them were profoundly sad.
[00:47:09]  And Teal writes here, unlike most young men living in boarding houses frequented by sailors, Stanley had avoided brothels.
[00:47:16]  However, on one occasion only, he had taken to a gilded parlor where he saw four young ladies in such scant clothing that he was, he wrote, speechless with amazement.
[00:47:24]  When they proceeded to take liberties with my person, they seemed to me to be so appallingly wicked that I shook them off and fled.
[00:47:29]  My disgust was so great that I never, in after years, could overcome my repugnance to females of that character.
[00:47:37]  I love that these women started touching him and he shook them off like a white dog.
[00:47:42]  That fucks him up.
[00:47:44]  Well, we are witches.
[00:47:46]  Yeah.
[00:47:47]  Yeah, he's that kind of dude.
[00:47:49]  And there is the thing he is scaredest of.
[00:47:52]  Like, Stanley is the kind of guy who will repeatedly face down like wild animals, you know, with a crude and unreliable rifle.
[00:48:01]  But he cannot handle a woman being like, I think you're cute.
[00:48:05]  Yeah.
[00:48:06]  The most dangerous animal of all.
[00:48:08]  Yeah, it's awesome.
[00:48:10]  And totally, totally to character.
[00:48:12]  So Jiel goes on to note, abandoned by a promiscuous mother, Henry's mistrust of prostitutes was not hypocritical.
[00:48:22]  And he notes, another incident confirmed his sexual naivety.
[00:48:26]  In his overcrowded boarding house, bed sharing was not unusual.
[00:48:29]  Once Stanley slept on a four poster with a youth called Dick Heaton, who had also jumped ship.
[00:48:34]  Although Dick was so modest, he would not retire by candlelight and walked in a suspiciously female manner.
[00:48:40]  Stanley only twigged his true sex at the end of three days.
[00:48:45]  And he like realizes this in bed when he sees one of Dick's breasts.
[00:48:48]  And I don't know if like Dick was actually a transgender person or just like a lot of times in those days, like if you were a woman who had to travel alone for some reason because you didn't have money, it's just safer to present as male.

=== Slavery And Sexual Naivety (05:23) ===

[00:49:00]  Hard to say what the actual truth here.
[00:49:02]  But he realizes.
[00:49:04]  Dick Heat.
[00:49:05]  That's a porn name for sure.
[00:49:11]  Yeah, that is a good porn name.
[00:49:14]  So Stanley's recollection of this is that like they're sleeping together.
[00:49:18]  You know, that was pretty normal at the time.
[00:49:19]  And Stanley realizes that Dick has breasts and lady parts.
[00:49:25]  Stanley realizes that Dick is, yeah.
[00:49:29]  And anyway, and he like freaks out and Dick has to flee the place.
[00:49:33]  Like he doesn't tell anyone, or at least Stanley claims he doesn't tell anyone.
[00:49:37]  But Dick is gone the next day and Stanley hears nothing else about him.
[00:49:41]  So I don't know.
[00:49:43]  No, no, no.
[00:49:45]  Not a great story.
[00:49:46]  Yeah, surely something.
[00:49:48]  Yeah, that's another one of those situations where something happened between the two of them.
[00:49:51]  And Henry Morton Stanley is like, I never want to hear about this person again.
[00:49:55]  He was just gone.
[00:49:55]  He's gone from my memory.
[00:49:56]  He's gone from the world.
[00:49:57]  He doesn't exist anymore.
[00:49:59]  I wouldn't be surprised if actually what happened is that he like turned him in or like made other people aware and things went really bad for Dick and it's something that horrified Stanley that he didn't talk about.
[00:50:09]  I don't know.
[00:50:09]  Hard to say.
[00:50:11]  We'll never know.
[00:50:12]  This could have actually gone just the way, because I could also see Henry Morton Stanley being so shocked and horrified by this realization that he just is spellbound for hours.
[00:50:22]  Yeah.
[00:50:22]  Like this rocks the firmament of his world.
[00:50:27]  The Mike Pence soul inside of him is like, no, no, no, no.
[00:50:32]  I need to lie down for a week.
[00:50:33]  This is worse than malaria.
[00:50:34]  Yeah.
[00:50:35]  Which he was dealing with constantly at the time.
[00:50:37]  So in November of 1860, Abraham Lincoln, America's greatest president, not named Taft, was elected after a contentious vote.
[00:50:45]  As a foreigner, Henry didn't really see what the big deal was, but his friend Dan Goury, the son of his store's biggest customer, filled him in.
[00:50:52]  And obviously, Dan Gorey is a rich southern kid in 1860.
[00:50:56]  So I'm going to give you a guess as to where his political allegiances wound up being during the whole war thing.
[00:51:01]  Stanley later wrote that he was informed, quote, the election of Abe Lincoln in November previous had created a hostile feeling in the South because this man had declared himself opposed to slavery.
[00:51:10]  And as soon as he became president in March, he would do all in his power to free the slaves.
[00:51:15]  Of course, said he, in that event, all slaveholders would be ruined.
[00:51:19]  Now, as you can probably guess, Dan and his father were people who owned other people for profit.
[00:51:25]  The Gorey family had 120 slaves, which is a lot of slaves.
[00:51:30]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:51:32]  I apologize.
[00:51:34]  Now, Dan told Henry that he suspected the South would secede over the issue of slavery, and whatever else you can say, he was not wrong about that.
[00:51:41]  And as the Civil War ramped up, Stanley's main concern was that the Union had seized a series of forts at the mouth of the Mississippi.
[00:51:49]  And he concluded that this meant that the election of Abraham Lincoln was going to ruin his business because he worked as a shipboy on the river.
[00:51:55]  And so that's why he says he decides to volunteer for the Confederate Army, or at least that's part of it.
[00:52:02]  So one of the funniest things in the world, Soren, in the whole goddamn world, is reading Tim Geal try to explain how Henry Morton Stanley, a man who fought for the Confederate Army, did not support slavery and was not a racist.
[00:52:16]  He spends so much of this book arguing that Stanley wasn't a racist.
[00:52:20]  And it is the funniest goddamn thing.
[00:52:23]  I mean, it's really, it's really amusing.
[00:52:26]  I'm going to read you a selection from Tim Gill's book, Stanley, so you can hear this man explain how totally not racist Stanley was.
[00:52:34]  Yes.
[00:52:35]  Though Henry expressed no revulsion towards slavery in the deep south, which was legal and accepted by everyone he knew, he was not prejudiced against black people.
[00:52:48]  Thought it was fine to own them, but that doesn't mean you're prejudiced.
[00:52:51]  You can be racist and fight, you can be anti-racist and fined with slavery.
[00:52:56]  It's possible.
[00:52:57]  Totally possible.
[00:52:59]  I guess that is an argument.
[00:53:01]  No, no, I think these people are perfectly equal to me in every way, and I just own them from by dint of force.
[00:53:07]  Like, I guess at least that's honest.
[00:53:11]  Boy, oh, boy.
[00:53:12]  Yeah.
[00:53:12]  I love that.
[00:53:13]  I love Jill that he's like, look, yes, okay, he lived with slavery and maybe got advantages from it, but it was legal, everybody.
[00:53:23]  It's fine.
[00:53:24]  It's legal.
[00:53:25]  It's fine, not just got advantages from it, like actively fought and was willing to kill for it.
[00:53:33]  It is a stance to take.
[00:53:35]  Yes, he fought for slavery, but he wasn't racist.
[00:53:39]  Excellent.
[00:53:41]  It's great, dude.
[00:53:42]  So I'm not even done with this fucking quote.
[00:53:45]  So he just explains that he's not prejudiced against black people.
[00:53:48]  Indeed, he had lived in a New Orleans boarding house that was owned by a freed black woman.
[00:53:52]  It had been recommended to him by two of James Speak's slaves.
[00:54:00]  Oh boy.
[00:54:01]  Now, Soren, you know who won't fight for slavery in 1860?
[00:54:07]  Abraham Lincoln.
[00:54:08]  That is accurate.
[00:54:10]  That is accurate.
[00:54:11]  And also the products and services that support this podcast, many of which are Abraham Lincoln.
[00:54:16]  He's a big, big donor to the pod.
[00:54:21]  The ghost of Abraham Lincoln.

=== Lincoln And Soren Fight (03:44) ===

[00:54:23]  Here we go.
[00:54:34]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:54:38]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:54:42]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:54:44]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:54:48]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:54:52]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:54:55]  Oh my god, this is the same man.
[00:54:57]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:55:02]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:55:04]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:55:06]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:55:08]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:55:11]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:55:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:55:15]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:55:20]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:55:21]  Trust me, babe.
[00:55:22]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:55:32]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:55:38]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:55:45]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:55:51]  From power to parenthood.
[00:55:53]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:55:57]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:55:59]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:56:01]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:56:06]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:56:12]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:56:15]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:56:21]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:56:23]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:56:26]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:56:34]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:56:40]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:56:44]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:56:50]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:57:00]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:57:05]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:57:08]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:57:11]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:57:13]  That's so funny.
[00:57:14]  Share each day with me each night, each morning.
[00:57:23]  Say you love me.
[00:57:25]  You know I.
[00:57:27]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:57:34]  What's up, everyone?
[00:57:35]  I'm Ago Modem.
[00:57:36]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:57:44]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:57:47]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:57:51]  I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:57:56]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:57:58]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:58:02]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

=== Leaving The Confederate Army (15:28) ===

[00:58:07]  Yeah.
[00:58:08]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:58:10]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:58:12]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:58:20]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:58:23]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:58:30]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:58:32]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:58:33]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:58:35]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:58:44]  All right, we're back.
[00:58:46]  Oh my gosh.
[00:58:47]  Oh, those ads.
[00:58:49]  I am just fucking...
[00:58:52]  You could hang a pipe rail gate off me.
[00:58:53]  That's how hard I am.
[00:58:54]  Anyway, let's roll back into the episode and not analyze that too much.
[00:58:59]  So, yeah, okay, we are still making it through this fucking paragraph of Tim Geal explaining why it's not racist to fight for the Confederacy.
[00:59:08]  My God.
[00:59:09]  So he's just explained that he lived in a New Orleans boarding house that was owned by a free black woman.
[00:59:13]  A frenzied desire to fight the Yankees inflamed most of the young men Stanley knew, and most of the young women urged them on.
[00:59:18]  Many customers of the store joined up after Captain Samuel G. Smith raised a local company called the Dixie Grays.
[00:59:24]  Because Henry felt the quarrel was not really his and was puzzled that whites meant to fight one another over the rights of blacks.
[00:59:29]  He did not enlist, but on receiving, so he's not racist, but he doesn't see why it's worth fighting over the rights of other people who aren't white.
[00:59:40]  Tim, are you reading the paragraph you're writing?
[00:59:44]  Can't we all just get along?
[00:59:46]  Not them.
[00:59:47]  I mean us, us, the real people.
[00:59:49]  The actual human beings.
[00:59:51]  Yeah.
[00:59:52]  You do get that feeling from old Timmy G, Timmy J.
[00:59:55]  So, quote, yeah.
[00:59:59]  But upon receiving in a parcel a chemise and a petticoat, such as a Negro lady's maid might wear, he felt compelled to ask, not least because suspecting that the Cinder was one of Dr. Gorey's beautiful daughters.
[01:00:10]  So he gets sent ladies' clothing by a woman he thinks is hot, and she's basically being like, You're a lady because you're not fighting for the South.
[01:00:18]  Oh, that's such a good burn for that time.
[01:00:21]  Yeah, and it's actually a really common thing historically.
[01:00:24]  A similar thing happened in England during World War I, where like women would get together to like shame men in town who hadn't volunteered to fight yet.
[01:00:32]  Variations of this have happened in a lot of places throughout history.
[01:00:36]  And Stanley, if that's true, Stanley, that's absolutely part of what Stanley does this for, is to not seem like a wimp, which, you know, scans.
[01:00:45]  But on the other hand, a woman he liked just sent him some of her clothes.
[01:00:50]  I mean, that's like silver lines.
[01:00:51]  No, no, no.
[01:00:52]  It wasn't her clothes.
[01:00:53]  It was the kind of ladies' clothing that a black woman would wear.
[01:00:57]  Oh, yeah, I bet you're not.
[01:00:58]  That was part of the Stanley don't like that.
[01:01:00]  No, he did not like that.
[01:01:04]  So he enlists as a private soldier under an officer named Henry H. Stanley, which is weird.
[01:01:10]  But nobody seems to make anything of it, so whatever.
[01:01:12]  He wound up fighting with a unit called the Dixie Grays at the Battle of Shiloh, which was a pretty bad battle.
[01:01:18]  Not a good time.
[01:01:19]  I'm familiar.
[01:01:20]  Yeah, not a great battle.
[01:01:21]  As far as battles go, if I had to be in a battle, it wouldn't be top of my list.
[01:01:26]  And yeah, he fought against the army of, I don't know about you, Soren, but my favorite career alcoholic, Ulysses Simpson Grant.
[01:01:34]  Yeah.
[01:01:34]  What a hero.
[01:01:35]  Fucking love her.
[01:01:38]  He fucking ruled, dude.
[01:01:40]  Oh, my gosh.
[01:01:41]  So Stanley saw heavy, nightmarish combat during the first day of the battle, and many of his friends were shot dead immediately in front of him.
[01:01:47]  He later wrote of his feelings while standing in the carnage that he felt shocked to see, quote, that the human form we made so much of should now be mutilated, hacked, and outraged, and that life, hitherto guarded as a sacred thing, should be given up to death.
[01:02:01]  So that's all right, Henry.
[01:02:02]  Yeah, we're going to be able to do that.
[01:02:03]  Yeah, come on, man.
[01:02:04]  Yeah, it's lame.
[01:02:05]  You're about the 80 billionth person to write about that.
[01:02:08]  And what you're about to do is wait.
[01:02:10]  You're about to do exactly that to hundreds of people.
[01:02:13]  Oh, my gosh.
[01:02:14]  So many more than 100, Soren.
[01:02:16]  So he was captured on the second day of fighting and found himself imprisoned in a POW camp outside of Chicago.
[01:02:21]  And this was not a nice place, although it probably compared favorably to the workhouse he'd grown up in.
[01:02:26]  After a brief confinement, he was given the opportunity to free himself by enlisting in the Union Army and fighting for the other side.
[01:02:33]  Adam Hosschild of King Leopold's Ghosts writes that he promptly agreed to do so.
[01:02:38]  And this is one of the few places where Hosschild has kind of a more positive view of Stanley than Tim Gene does.
[01:02:44]  But Tim Gene doesn't mean it that way.
[01:02:46]  He disagrees with this and thinks that it was hard for Stanley to leave the Confederacy.
[01:02:51]  Quote, Henry held out for six weeks before changing sides.
[01:02:55]  He had been through hell with his fellow southerners and felt disloyal.
[01:02:58]  But as a foreigner embroiled in the war by chance and having little understanding of the conflict's true significance, Stanley's behavior was not forgivable.
[01:03:06]  And it's funny because he says that he really just didn't understand what all this fighting was about.
[01:03:10]  And then later in the book, when Stanley becomes an anti-slavery crusader, makes a huge point about how good it was that he was an abolitionist.
[01:03:17]  How could he not have known what this fight was about?
[01:03:20]  That's great.
[01:03:23]  So it's awesome.
[01:03:27]  It's so cool.
[01:03:28]  Yeah.
[01:03:30]  It's cool that he feels the need to explain why leaving the Confederate Army was, quote, not unforgivable.
[01:03:37]  That says a lot about Gene.
[01:03:39]  That wasn't anyone's question, Tim.
[01:03:43]  So anyway, Stanley next spent some time fighting for the Union as an artillerist until he got sick from dysentery and received a medical discharge.
[01:03:50]  He spent a bit of time working as a sailor on the Atlantic before, in 1864, he enlisted in the Union Navy and got a posting on the frigate Minnesota by virtue of his very nice pinmanship.
[01:04:00]  He worked as a ship's clerk and was present for a naval battle wherein his ship bombarded a Confederate fort in North Carolina.
[01:04:07]  Henry Morton Stanley was one of a very small number of people to experience combat on both sides of the war, in the land and on the sea.
[01:04:13]  So that's a neat piece of trivia.
[01:04:15]  Well, not a lot of folks do that.
[01:04:18]  Yeah.
[01:04:18]  So he was in the Army and the Navy.
[01:04:20]  He was in the Confederate Army, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy during the course of the Civil War.
[01:04:26]  He got around a bit, you know?
[01:04:28]  Not a lot of people did that.
[01:04:30]  So once the Civil War was over, Stanley used some of his Army bucks to take a trip to Turkey with two of his friends, including a younger boy who basically worshiped Stanley named Louis No.
[01:04:39]  And this is a recurrent theme in Stanley's life.
[01:04:41]  There's always one or two or three young white boys hanging around who think he's the bee's knees, and most of them die.
[01:04:51]  But he seems to need to have adoring young men kind of hanging around him.
[01:04:55]  So the object of Stanley's trip was to just kind of wander around Turkey and then, quote, write a great book of adventure.
[01:05:02]  Oh, it's amazing.
[01:05:04]  Yeah, it is like the child.
[01:05:05]  It's like the career that I dreamed of having when I was nine.
[01:05:09]  Yeah.
[01:05:09]  Yeah.
[01:05:10]  It's like, go find yourself in this foreign country and then write a gripping book about it.
[01:05:16]  Yeah.
[01:05:16]  I mean, his eat-prey love would involve shooting a lot of people, but like that was the idea, right?
[01:05:20]  Yeah.
[01:05:23]  I'm not opposed to reading something like that either.
[01:05:25]  No, I too would like to travel somewhere different from what I'm used to and then write a great book of adventure.
[01:05:31]  That does sound fun.
[01:05:32]  Now, the fact that people like me and people like you find that fun is part of why the 1800s were a real rough period for a lot of the globe.
[01:05:42]  That's a good point.
[01:05:44]  That's a good point.
[01:05:46]  Yeah.
[01:05:47]  But, you know, whatever.
[01:05:49]  What we were just describing was a very, very tame version of Manifest Destiny.
[01:05:54]  Yeah, and it's like the version of Manifest Destiny that, I don't know, like Indiana Jones in 1010 books pass along, where it's like, yeah, it seems super fun to go have adventures and meet kooky characters in strange places.
[01:06:07]  What's going on about that?
[01:06:09]  Go get into scrapes with the crazy savages.
[01:06:12]  Oh.
[01:06:14]  Oh, yep.
[01:06:15]  Okay.
[01:06:16]  Yeah.
[01:06:16]  There's.
[01:06:18]  I see why that's problematic.
[01:06:20]  Yeah, the people who did that got so many people killed.
[01:06:23]  Okay.
[01:06:24]  Yeah.
[01:06:24]  So unfortunately, before they could go off to Turkey, No and Stanley lost almost all of their guns and equipment to a boating accident in the United States.
[01:06:35]  And they suffered a further accident in Anatolia when they actually get to Turkey.
[01:06:39]  And Louis No decided to start a campfire in the middle of a drought and it quickly raged out of control and the local police took Stanley and his other partner into custody.
[01:06:48]  They got out, but Louis Noe freaked out because he was scared of how angry Stanley was going to be.
[01:06:54]  And as soon as they got out of jail, he fled to a nearby island.
[01:06:57]  So Stanley catches up with his boy a few days later and he gives what No would later call a sadistic flogging and then forces him to return to the expedition.
[01:07:07]  So the slavery hater has a long history of whipping people and making them work for him, but in ways that aren't slavery.
[01:07:17]  Yeah, it's cool.
[01:07:18]  It's cool.
[01:07:21]  The voyage continued, and the crew made their way 300 miles inland to Turkey, with, again, no clear goal but adventure.
[01:07:28]  They reach a village called Chihisar, and here's how Jill describes what happens next.
[01:07:33]  According to No, who came to hate Stanley before the trip was over, Stanley tried to murder a Turk in order to steal his horses.
[01:07:41]  Oh, perfect.
[01:07:43]  Just gonna kill me, a man, and take his horses.
[01:07:46]  Henry would later claim that the Turk had made obscene overtures to Noah, and he, Stanley, had then slashed at him with his sword to defend his young friend.
[01:07:53]  Stanley's diary confirms that the Turk had been sexually drawn to No when they were riding together in a group.
[01:07:59]  But Stanley may have used his disgust as a pretext to attack and attempt to rob the man.
[01:08:05]  So again, this is the guy who is the most sympathetic to Stanley you could be.
[01:08:09]  He was like, maybe he used his friend's sexual assault as pretext to commit armed robberies.
[01:08:14]  He said, all right, guy.
[01:08:17]  He's like, oh, man, we need some fucking horses.
[01:08:20]  We got to get us some horses.
[01:08:22]  I'm going to steal them.
[01:08:24]  I'm going to make up a story about this guy wanting to sex with my friend.
[01:08:28]  So I can take his stuff.
[01:08:29]  Yeah.
[01:08:31]  It's cool.
[01:08:32]  I'm going to continue Jill's paragraph because the middle gymnastics here are real fun.
[01:08:37]  If he had really been contemplating murder, he would have surreptitiously loaded a gun in advance to be able to shoot the Turk without risking a hand-to-hand tussle with a man used to fighting with swords and daggers.
[01:08:47]  So both being like, look, here's what he would have done if he really wanted to kill the guy.
[01:08:54]  And also going, of course, Turks naturally know how to fight with daggers.
[01:08:59]  You always see them with those long curved swords.
[01:09:03]  But Henry made no such preparation.
[01:09:05]  After his hands had been badly cut in the fight and he was desperate to end it, he failed to lay hands on a single loaded gun among the weapons he had brought with him.
[01:09:12]  So like, he also didn't kill him in vengeance.
[01:09:14]  So he's a good guy.
[01:09:16]  It's so fun.
[01:09:18]  So.
[01:09:18]  Reputation spotless still.
[01:09:20]  Let's move on, everyone.
[01:09:22]  Still a flawless man.
[01:09:24]  Oh, man.
[01:09:25]  Now, Stanley and his men were surrounded by angry Turks, and they opted to surrender rather than fight.
[01:09:30]  They were beaten, tied up, and robbed, and Louis No was raped at knife point repeatedly.
[01:09:36]  They survived, though, and successfully brought suit against the men who'd attacked them.
[01:09:40]  Stanley won a $1,200 judgment, and he gave Louis No the smallest share.
[01:09:45]  Yeah.
[01:09:45]  Well, imagine the emotional turmoil this Henry Smorton Stanley had to go through.
[01:09:50]  Seeing his boy get beaten like that.
[01:09:52]  Yeah.
[01:09:53]  Oh, good lord.
[01:09:54]  So Stanley returned to the United States and got a job as a reporter.
[01:09:57]  And this is the first time in his life when Henry Morton Stanley was good at something.
[01:10:02]  His beat was the Indian Wars, which in 1867 were not super at a hopeful point for the Native American side.
[01:10:09]  And most of what Stanley saw in person were like, you know, we would call them desperate peace negotiations by the victims of a genocide and the genociders.
[01:10:20]  Now, this is the area where Hosschild and Jill diverge substantially, or at least one of them.
[01:10:25]  Hosschild claims that Stanley just lied and invented fake battles and massacres to basically rile up people's blood with lines like this.
[01:10:32]  The Indians, true to their promises, true to their bloody instincts, true to their savage hatred of the white race, true to the lessons instilled in their bosoms by their progenitors, are on the warpath.
[01:10:43]  Yeah, that's a bad one.
[01:10:45]  Yeah.
[01:10:47]  That's a bad one.
[01:10:50]  Jill has a totally different attitude and says that Stanley did witness some horrible crimes by Native Americans, but that he also reported sympathetically on them because he thought they'd been mistreated by the white man.
[01:11:02]  And he provides several examples of this.
[01:11:04]  And the reality seems to be that, number one, it wasn't uncommon to both write lies about the brutality of Native Americans and also write sympathetically about their plight.
[01:11:14]  That was huge in Europe.
[01:11:16]  There was this both all throughout.
[01:11:17]  We talked about this in our Carl May episode, who was Hitler's like favorite novelist and wrote a bunch of cowboy books.
[01:11:22]  May simultaneously wrote about how tragic it was that Native Americans were being exterminated and also portrayed them as brutal savage monsters.
[01:11:30]  Like he did both simultaneously, and that was kind of pretty common among Europeans.
[01:11:36]  And Stanley did the same thing.
[01:11:39]  So, yeah, it's cool.
[01:11:41]  Later, when explaining why it's okay that Stanley vastly exaggerated the number of people that he killed, Tim Geel cites this as a justification.
[01:11:49]  Quote, the knowledge he had gained when reporting from the Indian Wars that Americans like to read about red Indians being killed in retaliation for injuries.
[01:11:58]  Yeah, so there's a guy who's very sympathetic toward the Native Americans.
[01:12:01]  Yes, yes.
[01:12:03]  The least racist person possible, Soren.
[01:12:06]  Come on.
[01:12:08]  Let's give him a break, everybody.
[01:12:10]  The funniest part of Geel's biography is the multiple points where he offhandedly expresses that he's cleared Stanley from any charges of racism.
[01:12:20]  Just like, we can just dispense with that because I've proved he wasn't.
[01:12:25]  It's so good.
[01:12:27]  So eventually, the quality of Stanley's articles earned him the attention of James Gordon Bedditt Jr., the owner of the New York Herald, which was at the time one of the most profitable publications in the world at the moment.
[01:12:36]  I would try to compare it to a modern publication, but I can't think of a profitable one.
[01:12:40]  So we're just going to move on past that.
[01:12:44]  Stanley finangled himself a job, basically working for free to report on a war between the British government and the Emperor of Abyssinia.
[01:12:51]  So Stanley's one of those guys who are like, yeah, sometimes you got to write for free to get exposure.
[01:12:56]  Which is not ideal, but also isn't wrong.
[01:12:59]  Like, that is kind of the way it works, and it sucks and unfairly rewards people who are already rich and come from wealth.
[01:13:05]  But if you're willing to write for free, you can really jumpstart your career.
[01:13:09]  Yeah, or if either you're rich or you're used to living in absolute squalor your entire life.
[01:13:14]  Yes, that is the path I took and lived in a place where the ceiling collapsed on me more than once.
[01:13:22]  Quote, here's talking by Adam Hausschild describing his first war corresponding gig.
[01:13:28]  At Suez on his way to the war, Stanley bribed the cheap telegraph clerk to make sure that when correspondence reports arrived from the front, his would be the first cabled home.

=== First War Correspondent Gig (02:04) ===

[01:13:36]  His foresight paid off, and his glowing account of how the British won the war's only significant battle was the first to reach the world.
[01:13:41]  In a grand stroke of luck, the Trans-Mediterranean Telegraph cable broke just after Stanley's stories were sent off.
[01:13:46]  The dispatches of his exasperated rivals and even the British Army's official reports had to travel part of the way to Europe by ship.
[01:13:52]  In a Cairo hotel in June 1868, Stanley savored his scoop and the news that he had been named a permanent roving foreign correspondent for the Herald.
[01:14:00]  He was 27 years old.
[01:14:02]  So really fucks up his fellow reporters, but not a dumb call.
[01:14:06]  Yeah, you got it right.
[01:14:08]  And I had someone do the big equivalent of that to me when I was in Mosul.
[01:14:13]  I had an employee of a major news network bribe the Iraqi military to not let me and a bunch of other journalists pass the checkpoint.
[01:14:20]  And that is the most I could say about that story without being legally charged with something by the said company.
[01:14:27]  So we're going to roll right along.
[01:14:30]  It was a fun.
[01:14:31]  We got where we wanted to go because we had better fixers than they did, but it sucked.
[01:14:38]  So this was, you know, the first time in this story that Henry's life was in what you would call pretty good shape.
[01:14:44]  You know, he's a roving foreign correspondent.
[01:14:45]  He's gotten a huge scoop.
[01:14:47]  Money's starting to come in.
[01:14:48]  And he's in, in America, I don't know if you wouldn't call journalism respectable, but he has money and that's respectable.
[01:14:56]  And despite, you know, the fact that he fought for an empire founded on human bondage, you could call this an inspiring journey.
[01:15:03]  Abandoned child makes his way up to respected foreign correspondent.
[01:15:08]  That's a tale with an arc to it.
[01:15:10]  But Stanley wasn't satisfied with these achievements.
[01:15:12]  Journalism, then as now, was not a well-regarded profession in England.
[01:15:16]  People in America were a little bit more positive towards them.
[01:15:19]  William Morton Stanley had been living as an American for more than a decade at this point, but the opinions of English high society still very much mattered to him.
[01:15:25]  And he knew that the only real way for a man like him to sneak his way into the tippy top of English society was to become the most respected thing of that day, an African explorer.
[01:15:36]  And that, Soren, is where we're going to roll into in part two.

=== From Orphan To Journalist (04:50) ===

[01:15:40]  Are you ready for this shit?
[01:15:42]  This is where it gets real.
[01:15:43]  This is where it really starts cooking.
[01:15:45]  This is where he really starts, and I mean, really starts killing people.
[01:15:49]  Like, he's been doing, he's been doing some killing, don't get me wrong, but he really, he really ends some lives here.
[01:15:58]  All right, I can't wait.
[01:16:00]  All right, Soren.
[01:16:01]  You got anything to plug?
[01:16:04]  Yeah, I have my podcast, which is Soren and Dan.
[01:16:08]  It's called Quick Question with Soren and Dan, actually.
[01:16:10]  I don't even know the name of my own podcast.
[01:16:14]  You can also find me on Twitter at Soren underscore LTD.
[01:16:17]  And you can watch American Dead.
[01:16:20]  We got new episodes coming out in May.
[01:16:22]  He sure does.
[01:16:24]  You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com.
[01:16:27]  And you'll have plenty of time to do that with the whole being stuck inside thing.
[01:16:31]  You can buy t-shirts if you need to hire your nakedness in these times.
[01:16:35]  I'm actually shocked that our t-shirt sales are more or less the same, just because I didn't imagine.
[01:16:41]  I thought a lot more people would be going shirtless during this period of time.
[01:16:45]  And I haven't really processed my feelings on that.
[01:16:48]  Yeah, but we have Anderson merch.
[01:16:51]  We do have Anderson merch.
[01:16:52]  People should continue buying that so that they can use it to craft the flags that wave over the glorious revolution.
[01:16:59]  Just wait till August.
[01:17:01]  Those shirt sales will start tanking.
[01:17:03]  And then, and then buy a mug, buy a magnet, buy a sticker.
[01:17:08]  If you still have money because the economy hasn't collapsed, if not, continue enjoying our free content.
[01:17:13]  Check out some of the sources for this episode.
[01:17:17]  And go hug a cat.
[01:17:19]  You can still do that a lot of the time if you already have one.
[01:17:22]  Don't hug a stranger's cat.
[01:17:24]  You might spread the COVID.
[01:17:26]  That's true.
[01:17:27]  Which has bummed me out.
[01:17:28]  I love hugging strange cats.
[01:17:30]  You can also follow Robert on Twitter at iWrite.
[01:17:32]  Okay.
[01:17:33]  You can follow us.
[01:17:33]  I'm sure on Instagram at Bastardspod.
[01:17:35]  You can find the sources for this podcast under the episode description on all the apps you use.
[01:17:40]  And wash your hands.
[01:17:43]  Wash your hands.
[01:17:44]  Just sanitize those cats before you hug them.
[01:17:46]  You could do that still, Robert.
[01:17:47]  I do, but they just hate.
[01:17:49]  You know what?
[01:17:50]  They hate the tequila sprayer.
[01:17:51]  And I can't think of another way to sanitize a cat quickly.
[01:17:54]  But they don't like the hugging much either.
[01:17:56]  So that's too much.
[01:17:57]  It's kind of a wash for you.
[01:17:58]  Especially after I've sprayed them with the tequila.
[01:18:00]  It is just not good.
[01:18:02]  Anyway, the episode's over.
[01:18:06]  All right.
[01:18:16]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:18:24]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:18:27]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:18:29]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:18:31]  We always say: trust your girlfriends.
[01:18:35]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:18:37]  Trust me, babe.
[01:18:38]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:18:48]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:18:52]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:18:56]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[01:19:03]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[01:19:06]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:19:09]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:19:18]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[01:19:23]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:19:26]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:19:29]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:19:31]  That's so funny.
[01:19:33]  Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
[01:19:40]  Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:19:48]  What's up, everyone?
[01:19:49]  I'm Ego Modem.
[01:19:50]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[01:19:52]  Woo, woo, woo, woo.
[01:19:54]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:19:58]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:19:59]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:20:06]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:20:08]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:20:16]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:20:17]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:20:18]  There's a lot of life.
[01:20:20]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:20:27]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:20:30]  Guaranteed human.